Wood carving entails the application or use of a cutting tool to a block of wood material to remove portions of the wood in order to shape that wood block into a desired configuration or design. Traditionally, these cutting tools are conventional hand tools such as chisels and saws which are used by an individual to manually remove portions of a piece of wood in order to shape this piece in any manner the individual desires. These hand tools have been supplemented with automated or motorized cutting tools, such as electric routers and sanders, which reduce the amount of physical work necessary to shape to wood. Further, computer controlled cutting machines are available which may be programmed to automatically perform the cutting a shaping process and eliminate the manual exertion altogether, while providing relatively high accuracy and repeatability.
The above delineated woods carving tools and methodologies, however, have certain disadvantages. Particularly, the manual and motorized cutting tools do not enable an individual to make relatively fast and accurate duplicates of an object. That is, these manual tools require an individual to re-create the object sought to be duplicated by either making time consuming measurements of the object or by “eye-balling” or estimating the cutting operations needed to make a copy of the object. This type of duplication technique is inherently inaccurate and time consuming as it depends almost entirely upon the artistic skill of the individual.
The automated and computer controlled “machining centers” described above suffer from other disadvantages. Namely, these machining centers are oftentimes very expensive, have a relatively large “footprint”, and require formalized training in the programming language utilized by the computer controller. Additionally, these computer controlled machining centers may be able to accurately duplicate objects which are originally produced by that machine (i.e., the “original” object sought to duplicated was also carved by that computer controlled machine), but are unable to accurately duplicate objects which were not produced by that machine. Duplication of such an object would rely upon an individual to not only have the artistic skill necessary to accurately copy the object, but to also have the computer programming skill to translate the original object's shape into the computer language.
The present invention overcomes these and other disadvantages of the current wood carving tools and methodologies in a new and novel manner.